View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Biblioteca Digital de la Universidad de Alcalá DUZER, Chet Van. “The Mythic Geography of the Northern Polar Regions: Inventio fortunata and Buddhist Cosmology”. Culturas Populares. Revista Electrónica 2 (mayo-agosto 2006), 16 pp. http://www.culturaspopulares.org/textos2/articulos/duzer.pdf ISSN: 1886-5623 THE MYTHIC GEOGRAPHY OF THE NORTHERN POLAR REGIONS: INVENTIO FORTUNATA AND BUDDHIST COSMOLOGY CHET VAN DUZER UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Abstract This article compares the mythical geography of the northern polar regions in two very distinct traditions: a western European tradition based on a lost 14th century book titled Inventio fortunata, and the traditional Brahmanic Hindu and Buddhist conception of the earth. Both of these traditions involve a high mountain at the top of the world and water flowing in or out from this mountain in four streams that flow as if to the four cardinal points. Both traditions were represented cartographically. It is extremely unlikely that one of these traditions influenced the other; rather, it is an interesting case of strong similarities between two completely distinct conceptions of sacred centers. Key Words Mythical Geography. Northern Polar Regions. Inventio fortunata. Brahmanic Tradition. Hindu Tradition. Buddhist Tradition. Resumen Este artículo compara la geografía mítica de las regiones polares septentrionales en dos tradiciones muy distintas: la europea occidental que se basó en un libro perdido del siglo XIV titulado Inventio fortunata, y la concepción tradicional budista y brahamánica hindú de la tierra. Ambas tradiciones involucran una gran montaña en la cima del mundo y agua que fluye hacia adentro o hacia afuera de ella en cuatro corrientes hacia los cuatro puntos cardinales. Ambas tradiciones se representaron cartográficamente. Es muy improbable que una de estas tradiciones haya influido a la otra; más bien es un caso interesante de fuertes similitudes entre dos concepciones completamente diferentes de centros sagrados. Palabras clave Geografía mítica. Regiones del Polo Norte. Inventio fortunata. Tradición brahamánica. Tradición hindú. Tradición budista. Where is the center of the world? Is it the omphalos in the adytum of Apollo’s temple at Delphi? The “Navel of the World” pillar in the catholicon of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem?1 The temple of Madhyameshrava, “The Lord of the Center,” in the holy city of Benares, India? Easter Island in the South Pacific, whose ancient name, “To Pito o Te Henua,” means “The Navel of the World”? The stone marking Kilomètre Zéro on the Ile de la Cité, Paris, just in front of Notre Dame? The Kanro-dai pillar at the Tenrikyo Main Sanctuary in Tenri, Japan? The monument at El Mitad del Mundo, 22 km north of Quito, Ecuador? Lake Poso in the center of the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, the pivot of the earth and heavens, and the spot where a rope once joined the two? Sacred centers are usually located near the people in whose mythology they play a part,2 but there are distant spots on the earth that many different peoples recognize have a special central status: the North and South Poles. These spots are pierced by the axis of 1 St. Adamnan (late 7th century) in his De locis sanctis 1.11.1-3 alleges as a proof of the centrality of Jerusalem the fact that a column in the city casts no shadow at midday during the summer solstice. The pilgrim Saewulf, who was in the Holy Land in 1102 and 1103, writes: “At the head of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the wall outside, not far from the place called Calvary, is the place called Compas, which our Lord Jesus Christ himself signified and measured with his own hand as the middle of the world, according to the words of the Psalmist, ‘For God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth’.” Quoted from Thomas Wright, trans. and ed., Early Travels in Palestine (London, 1848), p. 38. This tradition continued into later centuries: in 1664 the French priest Eugene Roger in his La Terre Sainte, ou, Terre de promission put forth a detailed argument that the precise center of the earth is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the pillar in the Church marks this spot today. For a good discussion of early texts relating to the centrality of Jerusalem (without reference to the pillar in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher) see Philip S. Alexander, “Jerusalem as the Omphalos of the World: On the History of a Geographical Concept,” Judaism 46.182 (Spring, 1997), pp. 147-59, also published pp. 104-19 in Lee I. Levine, ed., Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York, 1999); also see Samuel Terrien, “The Omphalos Myth and Hebrew Religion,” Vetus Testamentum 20 (1970), pp. 315-338; Rudolf Simek, “The Journey to the Centre of the Earth: Jerusalem as the Hub of the World,” pp. 73-81 in his Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus, trans. Angela Hall (Woodbridge, UK, 1996); Dorothea R. French, “Journeys to the Center of the Earth: Medieval and Renaissance Pilgrimages to Mount Calvary,” pp. 45-81 in Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, ed., Journeys Toward God: Pilgrimage and Crusade (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1992); F. Niehoff, “Umbilicus Mundi - Der Nabel der Welt. Jerusalem und das heilige Grab im Spiegelvon Pilgerberichten und -karten, Kreuzzügen und Reliquiaren,” vol. 3, pp. 53-72 in Anton Legner, ed., Ornamenta ecclesiae: Kunst und Künstler der Romanik: Katalog zer Ausstellung des Schnütgen-Museums in der Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Köln, 1985 (Cologne, 1985); Kerstin Hengevoss- Dürkop, “Jerusalem - Das Zentrum der Ebstorf-Karte,” pp. 205-222 in Hartmut Kugler and Eckhard Michael, eds., Ein Weltbild vor Columbus: die Ebstorfer Weltkarte: Interdisziplinäres Colloquium 1988 (Weinheim: VCH, 1991); and Iain Macleod Higgins, “Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘Multi- Text’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville,” pp. 29-53 in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, eds. Sealy Gilles and Sylvia Tomasch (Philadelphia, 1998). 2 See the discussion of the “omphalos syndrome” (the tendency to locate the center of the world near oneself) by J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” pp. 277-312 in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, eds. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, 1988). 2 the heavens; they are the crowns of the world, about which all the stars dance, the points to which all compasses direct their needles. The recognition of the centrality of the earth’s poles is reflected in one of the names of sacred centers, axis mundi, as well as in various attempts to connect sacred centers with the Poles. The city of Beijing is known as the “Pivot of the Four Quarters,” and the sacred center of the city, the Forbidden City, is more precisely known as the “Purple Forbidden City” (Zi Jin Cheng), purple being the symbolic color of the North Star, and the designation “Purple Forbidden City” thus signifying that the emperor’s residence is the center of the world.3 There was also a ninth- century Islamic tradition, argued by al-Kisa’i of Kufa, that the Kaaba in Mecca (for which “the center of the earth” is a common epithet among Muslims) is located directly beneath the North Star.4 Thus symbolism of or connection with the Pole (in this paper I will be dealing almost exclusively with the North Pole) is often ascribed to local sacred centers, while the Pole itself, until this century both in belief and in fact unattainable, has received little mythological attention as a center. I will examine two systems of mythology relating to the northern polar regions, systems which, though from very different cultures, turn out to be remarkably similar. Gerardus Mercator (1512-94) is perhaps the only figure in the history of cartography whose name has become a household word, and his system of map projection, called the Mercator projection, is still widely used today, albeit usually in slightly modified forms. Mercator was famous for his meticulous research and accuracy, and thus it is quite a surprise to see for the first time Mercator’s map of the northern polar regions, Septentrionalium terrarum descriptio (1595)5: the map shows a North Pole that 3 See Florence Ayscough, “Notes on the Symbolism of the Purple Forbidden City,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 52 (1921), pp. 51-78; John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Power of Place: Bringing together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Boston, 1989), pp. 202-227; Jeffrey F. Meyer, “Traditional Peking: The Architecture of Conditional Power,” in The City as a Sacred Center: Essays on Six Asian Contexts, eds. Bardwell Smith and Holly Baker Reynolds (Leiden, 1987), pp. 114-133, esp. pp. 119-120; and Paul Wheatley, Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and Character of the Ancient Chinese City (Chicago, 1971), passim. 4 Mircea Eliade and Lawrence E. Sullivan, The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York, 1987), s.v. “Center of the World.” 5 The Septentrionalium terrarum descriptio was printed (posthumously) in 1595, and is very similar to an inset map of the northern polar region Mercator made on his world map of 1569, Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate accommodata, commonly referred to as Ad usum 3 is very unfamiliar to modern eyes (see figure 1). At the center of the map, and right at the Pole, stands a huge black mountain; this mountain was made of lodestone, and was the source of the earth’s magnetic field.6 The central mountain is surrounded by open water, and then further out by four large islands that form a ring around the Pole.